“He’ll bite us and make us all into vampires! And then we’ll be dead, yet still alive! Like Leonard Cohen!”
“The lavatory’s free! (unlike the country under the Thatcherite junta!)”
“The vampire’s escaped from the Little Persons’ Room!”
Terri and I are celebrating Halloween by watching Nasty, our favorite Young Ones
So, hey, guess what, it snowed today.
It actually snowed a lot and even accumulated a little, and Terri has better pictures of the heaving branches of heavy, wet, October snow, which she will no doubt post.
I went into Harvard Square to get my hair cut at Custom Barber Shop. I also had my annual Hot Vanilla from Toscanini’s which is just like a heart attack in a paper cup, but, what a hot, frothy, blissful way to die. I also picked up some lovely paper, cards, and envelopes from Bob Slate. Tomorrow, we’re heading to Letterpress Things to pick up some holiday printing supplies. Also, as I think I’ve pointed out in the past, none of my typefaces have these two symbols which have become important in the world: @ and /. However, I have a few hundred ¢s.
And tonight, we’re Bonnie and Clyding it up for Julie and Jim’s annual Halloween festivities. There will no doubt be photographic evidence.
For those of you who are dying to know whether rock star GM Theo Epstein will get on that plane and regret it soon and for the rest of his life, there is some interesting scoop in Gordon Edes boston.com chat. I guess it’s not scoop so much as it’s inside information into some of the personal things behind the negotiations. As Michael Corleone would say, it’s never “just business”.
I didn’t watch of the World Series except for the last game; it’s just hard to deal with Fox sports when you can’t turn down Joe Buck and Tim McCarver and turn up Jerry and Joe on WEEI. (Digression: speaking of Joe, did you know his son Duke is in the NYY media? We saw him on ESPN, working on the field at the Penn State game the other weekend, which was coincidentally being called by Sean McDonough. Anyway….) I agree with Ed that Lyle Lovett’s version of God Bless America, accompanied by cello, was actually really nice. And, yeah, I’m glad the White Sox won.
But most of all, I was glad to see Roberto Clemente make the Latino Legends team. He died way before his time.
I’ve become a big Jonathan Lethem fan in the last several months, after reading The Fortress of Solutude, Motherless Brooklyn, and Amnesia Moon.There’s a long and worthwhile interview from last week (which I did point to on my little links thing down the right). It starts getting more fun toward the end as he starts getting a little cranked up about literary snobiness toward non-’realistic’ fiction:
When you encounter the argument that there is a hierarchy where certain kinds of literary operations—which we’ll call ‘realism,’ for want of a handier term, though I’ll insist on the scare quotes—represent the only authentic and esteemed tradition, well, it’s a load of horseshit. When you see or hear that kind of hierarchy being proposed, it’s not a literary-critical operation. It’s a class operation. In that system of allusions, of unspoken castes and quarantines, mimetic fiction is associated with propriety, with the status quo defending itself, anxiously, against incursions from the great and wooly Beyond. When ‘realism’ is esteemed over other kinds of literary methods, you’re no longer in a literary-critical conversation; you’ve entered a displaced conversation about class. About the need for the Brahmin to keep an Untouchable well-marked and in close proximity, in order to confirm his role as Brahmin. Once something has been relegated or outcast or quarantined from propriety, you’re seeing a kind of burnishing of class credentials, a hastening to the redoubt, a drawing-up of the drawbridge of the castle, because the moat is too full of terrifying fish and fowl. A critic who expends much energy on delineating quarantines—“This sort of material is legitimate” is testifying as to their own anxieties as to whether or not they themselves are on the legitimate side of some imagined moat or gulf.
Her Turniptude gives you the Garbo update so I don’t have to. But I will point out that John Gilbert’s character, the Spanish Ambassador, articulates what is sort of the RealFake credo when he meets the incognito Queen of Sweden in a tavern: “Well, that’s civilization. To disguise the elemental with the glamorous.”
As Terri points out, we are going to see Queen Christina at the Brattle tomorrow night. If you read this, you are officially invited!
In light of this, perhaps you should tear yourself away from your couch and actually get out to the Brattle more often. It’s got a long and storied history, and I’d hate to see it close its doors. Maybe I’ll give out memberships for Christmas, in time for our annual ritual screening of It’s A Wonderful Life.
I spent a rainy Sunday waiting for the triumphant return of Terri reading the I Ching and watching four episodes of Twin Peaks. (Yes, still getting through last year’s Christmas presents).
You can never be as obsessed with something as you are when you’re 17, so I had been wondering what I’d still think of it. It seems much less of an oddity now, probably partly because it was so influential; careful cinematography and quirky characters are all over TV, well at least the remaining fiction series on TV. It’s more of a soap opera than I remember. I had forgotten about “Invitation to Love” the soap-opera-within-a-soap-opera the denizens watch; self-conscious or not, it’s still a soap opera. The characters are quirky but they are still pretty cardboard, there are identical cousins, plots and double crossings, affairs, generic town institutions (”the diner,” “the mill,” “the hotel”). Even the theme song could be for a soap opera. But I don’t have to suspend my critical faculties too hard to get swept up in the mood again.
Terri came home while I was 3/4 of the way through Episode 6. She was saying that she could never figure out when it was supposed to be happening. This led to a small epiphany. Part of what helps establish the creepy mood is the stuck-in-the-50’s clothes and sets and the score. But there’s no rock music in Twin Peaks. Not really. There’s some reverby 50’s twangy guitar in some of the songs. But the whole thing happens in a parallel universe where Elvis was never born. I think it really does give it a timeless quality which is really part of the appeal. I don’t think I’d mind living in a world where rock never existed.
It sucked, but it could have been worse. At least it was short, and they didn’t bother getting our hopes up.
The irony is that the only team still in it that I have any feeling for is the one that just handed us our still-beating hearts, the other Sox.
Oh, my god. Christopher Lydon interviews the Dresden Dolls. I am waiting at the edge of my seat for the inevitable moment when they discuss the song “Christopher Lydon“. The world short circuits sometimes.
You usually have to go to Harvard Square to get such public displays of hippiedom, but this is the second time I’ve happened upon The Second Line Social Aid Pleasure Society Brass Band belting something out and parading around in the Davis Square T environs.
I had walked home from Porter Square and stopped at Mike’s (yes, Mike’s) to wallow in lack-of-Terri-ness by revisiting the site of some early T&E Show adventures. While they have Harpoon now, I haven’t really been missing much by not going there for years, and the whole adventure would have been better with the Dubstress. Heading out to wash it down with a cold caffeinated somethin’ somethin’ from the Someday, it was hard not to hear these guys. (I do have to give some credit to the earnest acoustic guitar guy who continued to play, undeterred though inaudible in the center of the Square).
Seems they were playing at Johnny D’s at a(nother) hurricane benefit:
The evening will kick-off with the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, a 14-piece “raucous, stomp-your-foot-and-belt-out-the-choruses” (so says the Boston Globe) Cambridge-based street band, whose motto is “we aim to please if the cause is true and the time is right.” . Proceeds will go the the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic
There’s video: it seemed like a good time to try out the video features of the new camera (I’ll go into that later perhaps). Warning: the video is a big file, it’s .avi, it’s coming from the home server via cable modem, I didn’t even try to compress it, Mac users may need the VLC media player, and lastly and most importantly, there is Country Joe and the Fish content. You have been warned. If you are undeterred, well, Whoopee! we’re all gonna die [85MB, 3:54]. If you stick it out to the the end, it gets especially charming as a girl from the crowd rushes in and succeeds in getting a bunch of people dancing. I also found the kid with the camera phone charming.
[In case you missed them, here are Welcome to Somerville part 1 and part 2]
PS: Terri, I wish you would have been there. If you watch the video, note the socks on the hippie girl with the green bag; you would have been envious.
I love this story about John Densmore refusing to let Doors songs be used in ads.
“Everyone wanted him to do it,” said John Branca, an attorney who worked on the Cadillac proposal. “I told him that, really, people don’t frown on this anymore. It’s considered a branding exercise for the music. He told me he just couldn’t sell a song to a company that was polluting the world.”
…
But his stance against commercialization has won a chorus of support from the true believers of rock. In the Nation, Tom Waits wrote a letter in praise of Densmore: Corporations “suck the life and meaning from the songs and impregnate them with promises of a better life with their product. Eventually, artists will be going onstage like race-car drivers covered in hundreds of logos.”
Waits has since learned that holding out isn’t necessarily effective: He is suing General Motors for using what he describes as a Waits sound-alike in its European car commercials. …
There’s also some michegas about Ray Manzerek and the other guy touring under the name “The Doors”, to which Densmore said:
“I would love to play with the Doors and play those songs again. I would. And I will play again as the Doors. Just as soon as Jim shows up.”
It really is always the drummer who can’t let go, isn’t it?
If you’re as pathetic as me, you’re counting down the days until Ikea Stoughton opens. Novermber 9, kids. Gotta replace that Onkel unit I bought in Pittsburgh in 1995 with some better shelving. Need cheap tea lights! Need meatballs!
A while ago I mentioned in passing the big anti-gun billboard that faces Mass Pike near Fenway Park. (I totally misunderstood its message at the time, thinking it was a “yay, Massachusetts” message.)
Anyway, from the attention-grabbing, highly confrontational and emotional messages that that billboard usually features, you’d think the sponsor would be a militant anti-gun group. Not really. The Dig has the scoop:
“We need a nationwide membership group to engage reasonable gun owners who don’t think there should be unrestricted access to guns for kids, criminals and terrorists, and that’s what the NRA thinks. We’re going to set the record straight—you can be for gun rights and for violence prevention. It’s just common sense to lock your gun, require background checks and not sell 50-caliber assault rifles with no questions asked to any fanatic, terrorist and criminal.”